Harriet herself had been born before Christmas, in the middle of a snowstorm that was the biggest on record in Mississippi. There was a picture of this snowfall in the heart-shaped box: Tribulation’s alley of oaks bright with ice and Bounce, Adelaide’s long-dead terrier, dashing down the snow-covered walk mad with excitement, towards his mistress the photographer, caught forever in mid-bark—his tiny legs a blur, kicking a froth of snow behind him—in the moment of glorious anticipation before he reached his beloved. In the distance, the front door of Tribulation was thrown open and Robin, his timid sister Allison clinging to his waist, was waving joyously at the viewer. He was waving at Adelaide—who had snapped the picture—and at Edie, who was helping his mother out of the car; and at his baby sister Harriet, whom he had never seen before, and who was being brought home from the hospital for the first time on this snowy bright Christmas Eve.
Harriet had seen snow only twice, but all her life she knew that she had been born in it. Every Christmas Eve (smaller, sadder Christmases now, gathered around a gas heater in Libby’s stuffy little low-ceilinged house, drinking eggnog) Libby and Tat and Adelaide told the same story, the story of how they’d packed into Edie’s car and driven over to the hospital in Vicksburg to bring Harriet home in the snow.
“You were the best Christmas present we ever had,” they said. “Robin was so excited. The night before we went to get you he could hardly sleep, he kept your grandmother awake until four in the morning. And the first time he saw you, when we brought you inside, he was quiet for a minute and then he said, ‘Mother, you must have picked out the prettiest baby they had.’ ”
“Harriet was such a good baby,” said Harriet’s mother wistfully—seated by the heater, clasping her knees. Like Robin’s birthday and the anniversary of his death, Christmas was especially hard for her and everyone knew it.
“Was I good?”
“Yes, you were, darling.” It was true. Harriet had never cried or given anyone a moment of trouble before she had learned how to talk.
Harriet’s favorite picture in the heart-shaped box, which she studied by flashlight again and again, was of her and Robin and Allison in the parlor of Tribulation, beside the Christmas tree. It was the only picture, so far as she knew, of the three of them together; it was the only picture of herself which had been taken in her family’s old house. It communicated no sense whatever of the many dooms which were about to fall. The old Judge would be gone in a month, Tribulation would be lost forever and Robin would die in the spring but of course nobody had known that then; it was Christmas, there was a new baby in the house, everybody was happy and thought they would be happy forever.
In the photograph, Allison (grave in her white nightgown) stood barefoot beside Robin, who was holding baby Harriet—his expression a mixture of excitement and bewilderment, as if Harriet was a fancy toy he wasn’t quite sure how to handle. The Christmas tree sparkled beside them; peeking sweetly from the corner of the photograph were Robin’s cat Weenie and inquisitive Bounce, like the beasts come to witness the miracle in the stables. Above the scene the marble seraphim smiled. The light in the photograph was fractured, sentimental, incandescent with disaster. Even Bounce the terrier would be dead by the next Christmas.
————
After Robin’s death, the First Baptist Church started a collection for a gift in his memory—a Japanese quince, or perhaps new cushions for the church pews—but more money poured in than anyone had expected. One of the church’s six stained-glass windows—each depicting a scene from the life of Christ—had been shattered by a tree branch during a winter storm, and boarded up with plywood ever since. The pastor, who had despaired over the cost of replacing it, suggested using the money to buy a new one.
A considerable portion of the fund had come from the town’s schoolchildren. They had gone door to door, organized raffles and bake sales. Robin’s friend Pemberton Hull (who had played the Gingerbread Man to Robin’s blackbird in the kindergarten play) had given close to two hundred dollars to the memorial for his dead friend, a largesse which nine-year-old Pem claimed to have obtained by smashing his piggy bank but which he had actually stolen from his grandmother’s purse. (He had also attempted to contribute his mother’s engagement ring, ten silver teaspoons, and a Masonic tie tack whose origins no one was able to determine; it was set with diamonds and evidently worth some money.) But even without these handsome bequests, the total sum brought in by Robin’s classmates amounted to quite a lot; and it was suggested, instead of replacing the broken portrayal of the Wedding at Cana with the same scene, that something be done to honor not only Robin but the children who had worked so hard for him.
The new window—unveiled, to the gasps of the First Baptist congregation, a year and a half later—depicted a pleasant blue-eyed Jesus seated on a boulder beneath an olive tree and involved in conversation with a red-haired boy in a baseball cap who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Robin.
SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN TO COME UNTO ME
ran the inscription beneath the scene, and, engraved on a plaque beneath:
In Loving Memory of Robin Cleve Dufresnes
From the Schoolchildren of Alexandria, Mississippi
“For Theirs Shall Be the Kingdom of Heaven”
For all her life, Harriet had seen her brother ablaze in the same constellation as the archangel Gabriel, Saint John the Baptist, Joseph and Mary and of course Christ himself. The noonday sun streamed through his exalted form; and the purified outlines of his face (bobbed nose, elfin smile) shone with the same beatific clarity. It was a clarity all the more radiant for being childish, more vulnerable than John the Baptist and the others; yet in his small face too was the serene indifference of eternity, like a secret they all shared.
What exactly happened at Calvary, or in the grave? How did flesh ascend from lowliness and sorrow into this kaleidoscope of resurrection? Harriet didn’t know. But Robin knew, and the secret glowed in his transfigured face.
Christ’s own passage—aptly—was described as a Mystery, yet people were queerly uninterested in getting to the bottom of it. What exactly did the Bible mean when it said that Jesus rose from the dead? Had He returned only in spirit, an unsatisfactory spook of some sort? Apparently not, according to the Bible: Doubting Thomas had put a finger in one of the nail holes in His palm; He had been spotted, solid enough, on the road to Emmaus; He had even eaten a little snack over at one of the disciples’ houses. But if He had in fact risen from the dead in His earthly body, where was He now? And if He loved everybody as much as He claimed to, why then did anybody ever die at all?
When Harriet was about seven or eight, she had gone to the library in town and asked for some books on magic. But when she got them home, she was enraged to discover that they contained only tricks: balls disappearing from under cups, quarters dropping from people’s ears. Opposite the window which depicted Jesus and her brother was a scene of Lazarus raised from the dead. Over and over again, Harriet read the story about Lazarus in the Bible, but it refused to address even the most basic questions. What had Lazarus to say to Jesus and his sisters about his week in the grave? Did he still smell? Was he able to go back home and carry on living with his sisters, or was he frightening to the people around him and perhaps had to go off somewhere and live by himself like Frankenstein’s monster? She could not help thinking that if she, Harriet, had been there, she would have had more to say on the subject than Saint Luke did.
Perhaps it was all a story. Perhaps Jesus himself hadn’t risen from the dead, though everyone said He had; but if indeed He had rolled the stone away and stepped living from the grave why then not her brother, whom she saw every Sunday blazing by His side?